Hafiz and I were up on the widow’s walk beneath a flaming sky prancing to and fro, lunging, parrying, regaling the light with our imagined swordplay when his foot slipped unexpectedly on a pebble some bird had set there as a gift and my blade plunged into his belly and he gasped, staggered, and tumbled off the edge of the roof. I found him draped over the hedge with his leg cocked behind his back […]
All day I am sitting. On that bench. There is some wind nearby I recognize, or maybe it is this: a dove has flown through the doorway? The sky I mean. Two timbers and a lintel in my mind, and the clouds that are playing house upon the ocean. A dove has formed from the sky and my heart trembles because it knows of such things, and also because all day I am sitting on […]
Illusion is a grid of two-way streets, an endless network of choices. Asphalt riddled with diesels, sirens, and street lamps. Buildings with decisions stacked up to the sky like trays of factory-laid eggs waiting for chicks. Dropped ceiling meanings. Angled views. Helo pads on top. A strange silence up there. What if the engine fails? Parachute racks, lightning rods and hose reels. Tightropes strung from peak to peak. Wind socks for safety and guidance. The heavy […]
Some nights are for forgiveness. I can only let the mail pile up for so long. Then I have to open the notes I’ve been sending myself since who knows when, and really drink them in. Notice the handmade paper, the choice of twine, the careful hand-writing, the postmarks from places I never knew I’d been. How did I get there? When was I lost at sea? I realize… a distance has been opened, and […]
I am fragile, but when I shatter– as I must, and soon– a warmth will remain. You will find me again. That is the most dazzling magic. This realization comes while standing at the edge of this life, looking down, hovering weightless– a sand grain witness to a vast sea. Each arriving wave softens the distance into which my longing stretches. I am readying to dissolve. Together, can we cover the Vastness? Or will I buckle, […]
One night when Hafiz was working the phones, a call came in. The man began by announcing that he had a few questions, as if he were preparing his counter party for a barrage of heavy artillery. The way he said it made it sound like he had a few answers, too. Look, he said, you can’t really know if there is anything beyond this life or not, but consider: if there isn’t a God, […]
After reading the final passage of Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance, I pinched the book shut in one hand and took a deep, satisfying breath- the kind of breath you might take at dawn on the Seventh Day, a breathing into and through kind of breath. Part of that satisfaction was the rich fullness of having encountered a work of art that spoke to me on a deep level, a story and its telling that […]
That longing at the center of your being is Hafiz and Christ, the Buddha, ten thousand angelic beings, my mother, your great great Uncle so and so, the not so famous one, his pet Lhasa Apso Louie, along with everyone you’ve ever loved and ever will love and all their friends and neighbors plus a few party crashers and so on and so forth– hell, it may as well be Love Itself!– shouting and waving […]
Here in the Meanwhile, on the shores of Forever dotted with the charcoal stumps of forgotten fires, the mossy walls of collapsing wooden shanties and various debris of antiquity, such as: half-buried edges of glass, torn diary pages, ice picks, the bones of dead birds bleached by the sun, and a curious face caught in sepia, the faint notes of song drift past on the breeze, pastel tones that have nowhere else to go and so […]
What will it be like to Remember? Rumi advises we give up on this question1. My American football analogy goes like this: this is not a first down that we’re after. We can call out the chains and ask for a measurement, but the umpire will be dumbfounded and probably feint. Our questions are all boats without bottoms. The instant replay, on closer inspection, will reveal ten million angels on the nose of the football […]
Embracing Forever 